Angel’s Tip

by Alafair Burke

  After the media had unearthed the photograph, Jess had terrorized her for weeks, e-mailing her links to every online story he could find containing the image and taping copies of the picture in the most innocuous places—the inside of her medicine cabinet, the side of a milk carton, even a wallet-sized version around the grip of her service weapon. The reign of horror had finally ended after Ellie dug out an old picture of Jess in his Wham days. A white tank top emblazoned “Go Go” in pink neon letters would do nothing for Dog Park’s street cred.

  “You know what we should do?” Jess said. “Let’s go out.”

  “It’s already past ten o’clock.”

  “No place worth going any earlier. Come on. You’re home. I’m home. I’m still totally torqued by what I saw this morning. When was the last time we went out—like really went out?”

  Ellie hadn’t outgrown the stage of occasional late nights, but she was ready to hit the sack. She started to make her excuses, but then realized there was one place she wouldn’t mind checking out.

  “Ever heard of a club called Pulse?”

  CHAPTER 14

  NOT ONLY HAD JESS heard of Pulse, he was pretty sure he knew someone who worked there. He scrolled through his cell phone directory until he came to the name he was looking for.

  “Here she is. Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa Hutchinson?” Ellie asked.

  “I don’t do last names. I met her a few weeks ago at a bar in Williamsburg. She’s a friend of Kate. You met her once. She came with me to Johnny’s about a year ago.”

  “The lawyer?”

  “No, that was Rose. Kate’s in marketing or something. Short brown hair? Really tiny?”

  Jess was proving once again the vast reach of his impressive social network, yet another difference between them. Ellie would love to be one of those women with a tight circle of best friends, but a good portion of her life was dominated by a job that made her an outsider to most women, and those same women certainly didn’t want her cozying up to their husbands and boyfriends. Between work, serial monogamy, and part-time caregiving to the rest of the Hatcher family, she had enough on her plate anyway.

  Her brother, in contrast, had a way of meeting people once and forging lasting friendships with them, even if he didn’t run into them again for a year. And, more curiously, many of his social supporters were former girlfriends and past hookups who never seemed to begrudge Jess his refusal to commit to one woman (or one job, for that matter, or one mailing address) for more than a month at a time. Ellie’s best guess was that he had a way of attracting women who at least appreciated that, with Jess, what you saw was what you got: a fun guy and a good man who chose to remain in a perpetual state of adolescence.

  “Who’s the Vanessa Hutchinson you know?” Jess asked.

  “A bartender at Pulse. Mid-twenties, as I recall. No priors.”

  Jess gave her a perplexed look, and Ellie explained her newfound interest in the club, as well as the list she’d been given of all of the club’s current employees.

  “I should’ve known you had an ulterior motive for checking out a Grade A meat market.”

  “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a firsthand glimpse of the scene, see if anyone remembers seeing Chelsea.”

  “I guess hanging out with the yuppies one night isn’t going to kill me.”

  “Now I’m having second thoughts,” she said.

  “You’re killing me, El. I was just getting my brain into club mode.” He bounced his shoulders and mimicked the ubiquitous and repetitive uhnn-chk, uhnn-chk beat of techno music.

  “I’m not even sure we could get in.”

  “What good is that handy dandy badge for, if not pushing your way past a behemoth of a doorman?”

  “That would defeat the whole purpose. I was thinking I’d just go and hang out. Watch people. Talk a little. Be stealthy. But the club manager will recognize me. I was just there this afternoon—”

  “Yeah, looking like, well, the way you look when you’re working.”

  Ellie gave him an insulted look.

  “Sorry, but you know you can do better. Get yourself all slutted up, and you’ll blend in with the rest of the chicks. Besides, the manager of a club that big and that crowded is not going to pay attention to the likes of us.”

  She remembered Scott Bell, the club manager, speaking almost identical words that afternoon: When you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ellie emerged from her bedroom. Clothes? On. Makeup? Slathered. Hair? Fluffed, thanks to some backcombing and a few spritzes of spray.

  “Let’s get a move on before I change my mind.”

  Jess looked up from the black Hefty bag that he was digging around in on the living room floor. She recognized it as the bag of belongings from his last semi-permanent address, which he had snuck behind her television while she was in Kansas.

  He took a look at the outfit she had chosen: a black turtleneck sweater, her best jeans, and a pair of short black boots.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, continuing his rummaging. “Aha. I knew there was something in here that did not belong to me.”

  He pulled out a purple baby doll dress with a halter neckline.

  “Seriously?”

  ELLIE OFFERED to splurge for a cab to the Meatpacking District. With her bare legs popping out of her tiny new dress and her feet covered in nothing but her one pair of high-heeled sandals, a few bucks for a heated car struck her as a bargain.

  She made sure to keep her knees together as she swung herself out of the taxi. “Jesus. I don’t know what kind of woman lent you this dress, but I’m having a hard time not pulling a Britney here.”

  “Hey, you were the one who said you wanted to blend. Plus, I got news for you. The very attractive woman who left that dress behind is five inches taller than you.”

  Ellie was relieved to see fewer than twenty people waiting behind the red velvet rope erected outside the club entrance. She could tolerate a line of that length. Noticing that most of the other patrons were dressed at least somewhat appropriately for an early March night, she punched Jess in the bicep. “I was fine in what I had on.”

  “Those are the people who are waiting outside when it’s not even eleven o’clock yet.” Jess grabbed Ellie by the wrist and marched along the velvet rope to the muscled doorman posted at the club’s double doors. He was dressed entirely in black, all the way down to the cord spiraling from the earpiece he wore in his right ear.

  “Jess Hatcher. I’m on the list.”

  The man eyeballed Jess first. With his usual scruffy dark hair, three days’ beard, and long sleeved black T-shirt and skinny jeans, he could have been anything from a bicycle messenger to the lead singer of any one of the current postpunk bands that she found so interchangeable. Then the man’s gaze turned to Ellie.

  The Hatchers apparently passed with enough credibility for him to check the list. A frown started to form on his face as he browsed the clipboard. Then he flipped to a second page.

  “You’re good,” he said, stamping their hands with a rubber triangle sopped in red ink. When he stepped aside so they could enter, Ellie heard a few exasperated huffs from the dejected souls behind the velvet rope and realized she had never been so appreciative of special treatment. Down with egalitarianism. She was too freezing to care about the masses.

  “I called Vanessa while you were changing,” Jess explained. “And, you were right, her last name is indeed Hutchinson.”

  Once they were inside the club, Ellie had to concede that Jess had been right about her wardrobe choice. What had been a dimly lit empty warehouse just a few hours ago was now brimming with activity—primarily of the dancing, drinking, and flirting varieties, and almost entirely by young, fashion-forward, beautiful people. Not a single Gap sweater in the house.

  Jess led the way, forging a circuitous path around the dance floor, past the runway, and through the three-person-deep huddle encircling the bar. He raised a h
and toward a tall, thin waitress with long blond hair, heavy bangs, and a lot of black mascara. In the middle of a vigorous rattling of a silver martini shaker over her shoulder, the woman caught Jess’s eye and flashed him a bright wide smile. Vanessa Hutchinson was beautiful.

  She pulled the lid off the shaker and poured something bright blue into a martini glass, then handed the glass and a bottle of beer to a guy across the counter. He handed her forty dollars and told her to keep the change. Ellie wondered if she’d just witnessed a big tip to Vanessa, a big rip-off of the customer, or both.

  Vanessa ignored the many patrons who were eagerly competing for her eye contact and instead beelined toward Jess. “Hey, man. How are you?” She couldn’t manage a hug with the bar between them, but she did raise her arm high for some quick hand-squeezing contact.

  “Good. Pretty good. Thanks for taking care of us on short notice. This is my sister, Ellie.”

  Ellie said hey and thanked Vanessa for setting them up with the doorman.

  “Not a problem. Jack Daniels straight up, and what else?” she asked Ellie.

  “Johnnie Walker Black.”

  “Jack and Johnnie. I guess whisky runs in the family.”

  Seconds later, she handed the drinks to Jess and waved off the money Ellie tried to hand her. “I’ve got my hands full here, but you guys have fun, all right?”

  Jess thanked Vanessa again and asked her to find them if she got a break. She assured them she would.

  “Now what?” Jess asked, handing Ellie her drink.

  “Now we watch.”

  AT 11:04 P.M., Bill Harrington sat alone in his living room, watching the evening news from his recliner.

  A disturbing discovery to tell you about tonight in Manhattan. In the early hours of the morning, joggers found the partially nude body of nineteen-year-old Chelsea Hart at a construction site along the East River. Police tell us that Hart was a freshman at Indiana University and was in New York City for spring break. Police believe she was last seen alive at a club in the Meatpacking District on the west side of Manhattan. Anyone with information related to the case should call NYPD’s tip line at—

  Bill Harrington pressed down the footrest of his chair, stood, and made his way to the kitchen for a pen and pad of paper. He did not know anything at all about Chelsea Hart or her trip from Indiana, but he could not help but wonder if her murder had something to do with the dream that had pulled him from his bed so early that same morning, brushing his cheek like the tip of an angel’s wing.

  CHAPTER 15

  “THIS DETECTIVE WORK’S really hard.” Jess used a gap between two customers seated at the bar to drop off his empty glass.

  It had taken them only fifteen minutes to circle the entire club. Now they were back where they began, at the bar.

  “So tell me what you noticed,” Ellie said.

  Jess shrugged. “Hot girls. Rich guys. A lot of booze and bad dancing.”

  “See, here’s what I noticed. That girl over there?” She pointed to a petite brunette in a sleeveless turtleneck and skinny black pants. “She’s wearing the turtleneck to cover up marks on her throat, but when she looked in the mirror she didn’t see the finger-shaped bruises on the backs of both her arms. That explains the scratch on her boyfriend’s face.”

  Jess looked at the brunette’s male companion, a tall guy with a prominent forehead, five o’clock shadow, and, sure enough, a couple of claw marks near his right eye.

  “My guess is it happened last night or this morning,” Ellie explained over the mind-numbing dance music. “He’s taking her out tonight to make it up to her.”

  “Jesus, Ellie. Being you has got to be pretty fuckin’ depressing.”

  “That girl over there?” Ellie pointed to a younger-looking woman in a clingy wrap dress and high-heeled boots. “She just handed her ID to a guy who was heading out for a smoking break. He’ll be back any minute with some jailbait girl in tow. Oh, and there he is now,” she said, just as a young couple walked through the entrance.

  “Ellie Hatcher. Crime-detecting robot.”

  “And, finally, my guess is the bouncer—the one posted over there by the side exit—his name’s Jaime Rodriguez. Also on the list of Pulse employees.”

  Ellie was fairly certain she recognized the man from the booking photos she’d pulled up on her computer earlier in the day, when she ran all of the employees for criminal histories.

  If the bouncer was in fact Rodriguez, he’d cleaned up considerably in the last two years. In each of his prior booking photos, he’d carried that rough look found on so many kids who were raised more by the streets than by their parents. He’d worn his hair long and unwashed, his face concealed by sideburns and a goatee, his mouth set in a scowl. Now he was clean shaven with close-cropped hair and looked downright friendly. Had Rodriguez changed, or had he simply upgraded his chosen locale for slinging drugs?

  Jess ran off for a second round of drinks, and Ellie continued her people-watching. From what she could tell, Rodriguez’s job tonight was to stand near the exit to make sure no patrons used it to sneak their friends in. A false alarm set off by an open door would invoke hysteria, and locking the exit from the inside was the kind of stunt that could get a club’s ticket pulled with the city. So there Rodriguez stood, exchanging a few words here and there with passing patrons.

  One male customer must have been a regular. He had moppish blond hair and wore black dress pants, a gray sports coat, and a blue collared shirt that matched his eyes. He emerged from behind the long white curtains that separated the VIP rooms from the rest of the club and headed directly for Rodriguez, checking out the surroundings as he walked. After a brief but close-faced exchange, the two men dapped fists, top to bottom, bottom to top, then straight on.

  The mop-haired man walked back to the VIP lounge, and a tall, thin woman emerged, with that had-to-be-a-model look about her. Once past the curtains, the woman scanned the club, spotted Rodriguez, and made her way over to him. Ellie noticed the woman’s hand touch the bouncer’s, then immediately saw Rodriguez’s other hand pass over the top of the model’s handbag.

  Only twenty minutes in the club, and she’d already witnessed the staff involved in a hand-to-hand. If she was going to need leverage over Rodriguez or the club’s management, she had some now.

  A few minutes later, the same mop-haired guy emerged again from the VIP lounge. Another conversation with Rodriguez, this one a little longer. Rodriguez pulled a couple bills off the roll he’d taken from the model and handed them to the blond. The blond gave the bills a passing glance and pushed them into his front jacket pocket.

  Jess was back at Ellie’s side now and handed her another drink.

  As Ellie took a sip, she watched the man return to his private room and shook her head at his appearance. They were in the middle of Manhattan, and this guy looked like he’d just hopped off a surfboard. Why a grown man would opt for such a teeny-bopper hairstyle was beyond her.

  The fuddy-duddy nature of her own thoughts made Ellie feel old. She supposed that if she were a mere decade younger, she’d think the guy was good looking. Hot. Smokin’. Whatever the young people were calling it these days.

  Then she realized she’d stumbled onto something better than the kind of small-time hand-to-hand drug transactions that were taking place in every club in the city tonight. The guy in the VIP lounge had blond moppish hair. Cute more than good looking. Like an older Zac Whatever-His-Name-Was.

  “Jess, we need to talk to Vanessa. Now.”

  CHAPTER 16

  VANESSA MET THEM at the end of the bar, in front of the office door Ellie had seen the club manager use earlier that day.

  “Jess. I love you, man, but I gotta work.”

  “This’ll just take a sec.”

  “If someone just walked through that curtain over there”—Ellie pointed to the place where she’d last seen the shaggy-haired blond—“can you tell which VIP room that is?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Can
you find out what credit card’s being used to hold the room?”

  A worried look crossed Vanessa’s face. “Look, I don’t know what you guys have in mind, but—”

  Ellie leaned in closer. “I’m a cop. I was here today with my partner, talking to your manager, Scott Bell. Is he here?”

  Vanessa’s expression changed to one of recognition. “Oh, shit. Is this about that girl?”

  “Scott told you?”

  “I heard him talking about it on the phone when I came in tonight. Oh, my God. I thought you were just here with Jess—”

  “I am. Do you remember seeing Chelsea Hart here last night? She would’ve been drinking Angel’s Tips.”

  “For chicks who want to get wasted off a milkshake. No, I’d remember that one.”

  “I really need that credit card information. You can run it past Scott if you have to—”

  Vanessa didn’t require convincing. She walked directly to the cash register behind the bar. She hit a button to open the drawer, flipped through a few pieces of paper, and returned with an American Express Black Card bearing the name Capital Research Technologies.

  Ellie didn’t need to check the list of credit card accounts in her purse to be certain, but she made the comparison anyway. Same card. Same club. One night earlier.

  J. J. ROGAN WALKED through the front doors of Pulse a mere fifteen minutes later.

  “Nice outfit,” Rogan observed. Rogan was sporting the same suit he’d worn to work during the day, and Ellie wondered if he’d been out himself when she’d interrupted. “Don’t you ever sleep, Hatcher?”